Now, this is a well crafted novel.  The plot, the characters, the writing...it has it all.  Breadcrumbs laid out at the beginning are revisited at the end, characters grow and change and remain flawed, and things happen in unpredictable, but plausible ways.  The side quests, the small moments of interactions between characters, and the way it all comes back together in soft, satisfying ending just really struck a chord with me.  

I love a story about friendship and this is a great story about complex friendships. Childhoods steeped in pain, each for a different reason, lived side-by-side in the same town, isolated from each other and yet right there together.  I found it so powerful.  

​Recommend.

This is the rare memoir that really explores a childhood of abuse and neglect with raw insight.  The poverty, emotional abuse, assaults, and neglect that these kids experience is couched in the context of the emotional highs of being in a family struggling with mental health and addiction.  The systemic failures of schools, child welfare, and communities are rampant and painful.  Even as we can see what is coming, it still is a shock to hear related.

It isn't as easy as providing housing, since much of the time the parents made choices to live in cars or uninhabitable spaces when housing was available.  They made decisions to prioritize adventure and a counter-cultural lifestyles at the expense of stability, feeding themselves candy and alcohol while the children actually starved. They moved when child welfare became involved, made the children leave behind their most precious possessions for no reason, and vacillated between telling the children they were smarter and better than everyone and vicious teardowns.  

All of the abuse their mother experienced at the hands of their father existed in contrast to his sometimes adventurous, carefree, fun-loving charm in ways that caused so much confusion for the kids.  While their mother was experiencing this violence, though, she failed to protect them not only from their father, but also from sexual abuse by the random people that circulated around them.  The layers of trauma the kids experienced and lack of outside support to put it in perspective is well described here, culminating in a moment in college where the author is taking a class on poverty.  When discussing homelessness, the teacher calls on her to discuss the causes and she responds that sometimes, people just chose that lifestyle. This was absolutely consistent not only with her childhood, but also with her parents' situation at the time she was taking that class.  The teacher shames her in front of the class, asking, "What do you know about poverty and homelessness?" and once again, no one steps up to validate her experience or provides her with support.  It was just a absolutely heartbreaking that even when she is building this new life that might pull her out of that poverty, this is what she is met with.

I was disappointed that the ending didn't do much to tie up themes and bring things together in the way I have come to expect from a really good book.  Granted, this is harder to do in a memoir of a life that is still being lived, but I nevertheless was left unfulfilled in the end.  Even with that, I think it is worth reading.

​Recommend.

This is a strange novel that is hard to classify.  It follows Raja and his mother for 50+ years following the many changes in Lebanon starting in the 1960's. Through times of prosperity and joy to war and devastation, Raja's life as a gay man is filled with times of love and light and some times of darkness and hatred, including extended scenes of sexual abuse. I really don't know what to make of the book overall.  Parts of it gave me a glimpse into a life and a time and a community I hadn't ever read about before, which I always really love in a book.  Part of it was bleak and full of family dysfunction.  The community bullying and othering reminds us how universal those themes are, across time and place and culture.  The sexual abuse was complicated, but explored consent in the context of captivity in a unique way.  The theme of things not always being as they seem from the outside is also well explored here in ways that I haven't developed well in other contexts. Huge bonus points for an ending in which a survivor just embraces his anger, refuses to feel guilty or not forgiving their abuser, and finding their own path of survival that doesn't take anyone else's opinion into account.

It isn't an easy or fast read and it is the opposite of light.  Even when it is openly funny, I find that humor to be harsh.  All of this leads me to a not not recommended, although I know I will be recommending it for some people.

​Not not recommended.

Typically, I am not a big fan of stories told via a series of letters, so this book had a lot to over come and, small spoiler alert, it did not.  It started just really disjoined and boring and this went on for a really long time-- at least half the book.  I dutifully plugged along wondering what all the hype was about.  

And then, all of a sudden it got really interesting.  The unlikeable main character started to show some likeable qualities and I started to have some compassion for her. An aging attorney, losing her sight, she is a prolific writer of letters and emails to friends, family, acquaintances, and authors. The story unfolds as these letters are written, making it a one-sided narration. For most of the second half of the book, where we watch her explore her grief over the loss of her child, is heart wrenching and compelling.  The problem was that once she unloads the horrific secret she has been holding about that death, I was just unimpressed and found it someone misogynistic.  The book itself has a tread of distain for her commitment to her career, at the cost of being the kind of parent that society expected her to be.  That the ultimate conclusion of the book reinforced those stereotypes--that a working mother is inherently negligent and her children will suffer or even die because of that--just didn't sit right with me. I am surprised how many professional women are drawn to this book, but perhaps that is the internalized message we have all received that career women are terrible moms.  No thanks.

​Not recommended.

For some reason, this 1995 book is having a comeback moment in the spotlight, as I have heard it discussed or referenced in a variety of contexts just before and after having read it, including multiple friends who just read it or have it on the TBR pile.  As a post-apocalypse novel, it is bleak even for the genre.  It was originally written in French so I don't know if the original was written this way, but the translation is stripped of pretty much all nuanced language, making it very harsh.  This plainness matches the tone of the story and the directness of the narrator, but makes the read unusually uncomfortable, independent of the topic.

And the plot is also a harsh landscape of incarceration and then a reflection of what it means to be freed from a jail only to find the world outside desolate.  Echoes of other stories of the end of humanity haunted my thoughts as I read this, while at the same time the world never felt borrowed from other works.  

I was left just so sad. The bleakness of the world rarely lifts. When it does, it is fleeting and it returns to the question or what it means to live ones own life without any expectations or pressures, but also with a sense of meaningful purpose beyond mere survival, alone during times when there there are other humans in your close space and when there is no one at all around.  

Introspective and thought-provoking, I think it is not not recommended just because it left me feeling so empty.  Don't read during a depressive episode.

​Not not recommended.

I don't know all of a sudden in the last two years I am getting a plethora of horror recommended to me.  Prior to last year, I didn't even know there was a "feminist horror" genre.  Perhaps it is because Here Lies A Vengeful Bitch ended up being a surprise (to me) 2025 hit, I find myself unexpectedly in what turns out to be not just suspenseful, scary stories, but actually terrifying ones with these twist endings that are disturbing.  The graphic violence in this book pushed me to the point of almost throwing up at one point.  It was too much.  Just too much.  

Yes, the plot was clever and progressive and maybe even ultimately empowering at some level in a warped kind of way, but it was also just sad and depressing, as well as gross in places.  

Did it also suck me in and create a ghostly world that I was invested in and wanted to know what happened? Also, yes. But, I am not sure I ended up wanting to know--even though the writing was good and the plotting above average.

SPOILER ALERT:

*******
While this is a book that starts as a story about a woman caught in an abusive relationship with her house, in the end it is actually her husband who is the abuser. All the rest is the story survivors convince themselves is true in other to survive--is it mental illness, a failing of religious faith, or is it really the ghost in the house there to protect you from your abuser?  There is perhaps some comfort in the Good-bye Earl/Janie's Got a Gun/kill-your-abuser-to set-you-free narrative, but at some level the fantasy that it frees you doesn't hold together for me anymore and this story is no exception. When it turns out it was the supernatural house that that killed him, then turned on the cops, but let her and her daughter survivor--well, it was just a bit too  much for me.
*******

Not recommended.

​Spoiler alert: You cannot rape someone into not being vegetarian anymore and hitting someone struggling with mental health isn't going to cure them. The protagonists husband and father didn't get this memo and the fact that her entire family turns on her in an effort to force or trick her into eating meat was horrifying.  The story starts off strong, quickly taking a dark turn into abuse and control that illuminates how that extends to women's bodies.  The cultural pressures to conform depicted here in South Korea plays out differently in North America, but isn't entirely different at its core.
END SPOILER ALERT

This book stayed with long after I read it. It was hard to read and it was painful to reflect on.  In the end, I am recommending it, but with a strong note that I know it will not be for everyone.

For the first half of this book, I was entirely unimpressed with the book. I did not like the characters. I was horrified by the whole premise where the addict kills his kid when he drives drunk on morning. I hated how the author played with emotion, making me simultaneously hate the guy, but also eel so sorry for him and his situation.  The relationship with his wife, his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, all portrayed with raw pain and in the first act, this just felt like a poor attempt to manipulate the reader.

But, about half-way through the book, everything shifted for me. I had no idea what was coming, so I didn't know what I was getting into.  I think is is probably why I ended really liking this book a lot.  I want to preserve that for you if you are going to read it, so spoiler alerts ahead here...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!


This is essentially a book about the need for prison reform.  It is absolutely heartbreaking to experience the incarceration of an addict whose trauma is killing him.  The brutality of prison, the lack of services, the sexual abuse, the psychological torture, all of it was raw and complicated.  This unlikeable guy, who killed his kid, who lied to his wife, who is passive aggressive and narcissistic, and who lacks significant insight into his psyche doesn't deserve what happens to him in prison--no one would.  There are moments of joy and connection, but those are outweighed by layers and layers of pain, bad luck that just compounds and is heartbreaking -- up to the end when COVID hits the prison.  

END SPOILER ALERT??

Sad from start to finish, this is worth reading for the thought-provoking analysis of the criminal responsibility in an era of retribution.

​Recommend.

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At its core, this is a ghost story, a violent, horrifying ghost story about the kids banished to a reformatory for committing petty mostly pretty crimes.  The main character, a young Black boy incarcerated in a reformatory school for defending himself in a fight. Everything about this book is dark, graphic, and depressing, except maybe the very end, but by then it was too late for me to appreciate that.  I don't like horror or graphic violence, so this was just not for me at all. 

I suppose I wish I were the kind of person who could tolerate this level of historically accurate misery better, but even with what could be considered an empowering ending, I just couldn't get a lot of the terrorizing scenes out of my mind and while that might have been justified by the context of the story or even the point of the book, the gore and horror of it was too much. 

Do not recommend.
​
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Written from the perspective of a young girl born to a Danish mother and deployed American serviceman, the story unfolds as the narrator lands in Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s to live with her father's mother and sister.  So much nuance here as she discovers what it means to be Black in the US, first living with her parents in Chicago and then living in Portland.  From the beginning, it is obvious that she has experienced a trauma. Her mother is dead, her father is absent, and she spent a long stint in the hospital. 

As the story unfolds, we learn snippets of her past, as she grows up an outsider living with her grandmother, not Black enough or white enough, her quest to find her place is a beautiful coming of age story and neatly demonstrates how little trauma was understood in the 80's.

​recommend.
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